How South Park Pulled off "About Last Night..."

Share.

Exclusive: Co-Creator Matt Stone tells us how they completed their post-election episode less than 24 hours after the winner was known.

By Travis Fickett

If you watched South Park this week, you may have been surprised that the episode was not just about the election the night before - but about the results of the night before. South Park can be timely - but this was certainly a great bit of timing for a show that often gets the last word on moments in our history.

We managed to get on the phone with the often elusive Matt Stone, co-creator -- along with Trey Parker -- of the show. Matt talked to us about how they managed to pull off this episode in time, their contingency plan should things have gone differently, and a whole lot more.

IGN TV: First and foremost, I want to ask you: how did you get this episode finished in time?

Matt Stone: We talked about doing an election episode for a couple of months. Usually we start talking about these things when we start talking about the whole run, about a month ago. So we started talking about what episodes we'd like to do. When we started talking about the election, we were like "That's on a Tuesday. Wednesday is the next day... We could have a whole episode!"

So we started talking about stories that would be neutral to who won. And that's when we came up with the whole diamond heist thing. We were going to produce a couple of different shows, but we don't do the show that far in advance. So as it got closer, in the last few weeks – it was so obvious that Obama was going to win that we just produced the Obama show. We just did it and assumed the polls would be right.

IGN: Is it three weeks that is your typical turnaround?

Stone: Well, really it's about a week.

Matt Stone

IGN: Okay, wow.

Stone: So we didn't really start in earnest on this show until one week ago. For the speeches we had a blank space in there, with the acceptance and concession speeches in there. That only takes us a couple hours to do. It's a very easy animation. The main thing was waiting until they gave the speeches so we could get the backdrops and see what it looked like. Then we copied down the speech and put it in there.

What was funny is that we'd written placeholder crap and put it in there. It was "I want to thank my fellow Americans and blah blah blah" and "Change is going to come.." We just wrote some junk to put in there as temp, and it was amazing how much the temporary stuff matched the boilerplate in there. We then took a few things that people would remember, like Obama promising his kids the dog. We copied the words and put that in, but that was easy for us because we do the show so quick. We were here all night, but we usually are on Tuesday finishing the show.

IGN: So you didn't deliver it late to the network?

Stone: Well, we always deliver it late. [Laughs] We can't get any later than we do! We're delivering it right up against the wire every single week. We can't do it any later or it won't make the air. Trey and I got home at 10:30 yesterday morning. We're there for 24 hours. It sucks, I f***ing hate it! It's physically a challenge and kind of a torment, but it's really the only way we know how to do the show.

IGN: So when you were breaking this episode, how did you decide which characters would be on which side of the political spectrum?

Stone: Well, Randy is funny when he gets drunk. It was more the circumstances for what we needed to make the story work. Like we knew Kyle's brother was going to get hurt, so his family had to be out drunk and partying. And Garrison, it's funny that he's a republican because he's this total self-hating gay man. It was pretty arbitrary to tell you the truth. It isn't even really that political of an episode, really. The Obama supporters partying in the street, you knew that when he won people would party in the street. And every election the other side is devastated and convinced it's the end of the world. At least the ones I can remember.